Mullvad Privacy Companion is now open source | Hacker News Reader

Mullvad Privacy Companion is now open source

mullvad.net

160 pointslegrande16 comments

Just stating here that you'll almost never find Mullvad on a list of top vpns solely due to the fact that all of the top vpns are owned by the same company masquerading as separate ones and pays for all of those lists.

Thanks for open sourcing it.

Tbh, I think the main reason you never see Mullvad on those lists is that they're targetted at people who want to watch region-restricted TV series.

They also don't have an affiliate program, so there isn't monetary incentive for websites to promote it.

To be clear, you're saying that most other VPNs are targeting that audience, not mullvad, right?

(That's what I'm reading)

Streaming services take efforts to block VPNs. VPNs targeting users who want to access streaming services need to work to circumvent the efforts of streaming services. Mullvad does not attempt to do this so.

Yup.

Which company?

Kape Technologies owns ExpressVPN, PIA, CyberGhost and a bunch of other VPNs…

I'm hopeful that open-sourcing this is the beginning of an internal initiative to start promoting, improving and adding to this product, rather an an internal initiative to offload development to the community and abandon.

As it stands right now, it doesn't do a huge amount - there are much more popular & well-maintained add-ons out there that do this, and the add-on recommendations it makes are narrow and overly prescriptive (e.g. pushing Privacy Badger when you're already using more general overlapping solutions like uBlock).

Mullvad's a great company with a lot of community respect so a "well crafted" add-on of this nature coming from them could have a lot of potential.

This might be the worst worded press release I’ve seen this year. The first paragraph is repeated almost verbatim in the second and third, and none of the rest of this tells me what it does.

It’s a browser extension - at least they got that out, but it increases my privacy how? What does it do that my browser doesn’t already do?

People, if you get one shot to tell your story - tell your story!

Offering anything promising privacy or security that is not open source is just a joke. So this is absolute minimum step. Unfortunately even the IT industry does not widely understand that, how would laymen do?

I have good opinions of Mullvad but I could not find what does it offer that other similar extensions do not?

Also, seems like so many privacy-advocating companies are releasing these kind of browser extensions - all doing similar things - while preventing fingerprinting without compromising user experience is still quite difficult.

I think you answered your own question. They are going after easier low hanging fruit that keeps them on par with other services.

They aren't owned by a company that owns multiple other vpns that they equally boost. It's a pretty self-contained entity ran through without overmarketing or shady business structure.

They don't have much data on record for each account. You just get an account number, thats it. No name or address required, and you can pay by mailing them cash... I find that rather unique. Also they have a no-nonsense payment scheme, no incentives to pay for a full year vs a month, so real easy to just pay for a month here and there

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